The story might start with some kid in the foothills, near Mount Airy. Thanksgiving weekend, he's on his first hunting trip, for deer, at least; got a new rifle as a pre-Christmas gift. It's a cold and wet morning, a mist hovering over the field when his buck appears like Hamlet's father's ghost, quieter. The boy sights and shoots, nervous, maybe a hunter but not a killer, really, barely hits, grazes a thigh. The deer escapes, panicked and pained. The wound heals, mostly, and the deer adapts, survives, makes due. A minor miracle, the things we get used to.
A few months later, that same deer ends the story by being a little slow in the thigh on a dark road Valentine's Night, a little snow, a little ice, a little drunk and that deer is tumbling through the windshield of a now-crumpled Honda Civic, landing in the lap of a now-dead daughter/sister/lover of someone, intended lover of someone else, possible mother to yet another undetermined party.
That's just one simple story and it's a lie. Well, sort of. The story began long before that boy raised his sight and ended long after that girl passed beneath the EMT guys, who sadly knew her from high school.
It's a story that has been going on for a much longer time. It's still going on, connected to an innumerable network of other stories. Abstractly funny, personally tragic. We wail and marvel and thrash around in the King Kong grip of grief and wonder and fear. Is the instrument of my death on its way? Has that particular row of dominoes started to tumble, that particular game of Mousetrap set up in the basement rec room of destiny?
Knowing this, or at least suspecting all this could be underfoot, obviously is underfoot, what could be the harm of taking you up into the mountains this Friday night, the cooler air zipping by the open windows in an Appalachian curtain of cloud, finding a little sad hotel put our bags, stow our bodies for a night or two? However long it takes. What harm indeed?...unless that's where it starts for me, for you...where the hourglass finally turns for one of us.
No. Perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe it's better to open a bottle of wine, sit at home with the stereo and listen to the nightly thunderstorms wrack the side of the house and whistle through the attic. That would be better after all...unless.
